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androidi

Great! My "F12-skillz" (aka IE Developer Tools) could not the explain this, maybe yours can? I have configured Flash in "manage addons" so that the bar is displayed only if the site asks for it. (= I clicked "Remove all sites")

What I'm hoping to hear is what is the offending code and where was it loaded from and did you find it using IE's Developer Tools or was there something else required or some more efficient way to find it.

joechung

The analytics scripts do Flash detection by trying to instantiate different versions of Flash in IE due to IE's lack of support for navigator.plugins. This triggers IE 8 to warn you that the page is trying to use the add-on even though there isn't any Flash content on Channel 9.

androidi

In reply to joechung

#Oct 30th @ 5:05 PM

That's not conceptually much different from port scanning then. And that's against the law around here. Just kidding. But unless they're going to push some Flash on the site I really don't see what business they have trying to detect if I have Flash anyway. "Passive detection" might be passable but such "active detection" by brute forcing is questionable.

Also whether or not I have Flash installed is a very personal matter, I didn't sign up to give that information to 3rd parties. There's nothing about such in the Privacy/Terms of use that I could see. Smiley

This inspired me to look into the InPrivate filtering feature in IE8 but seems that it's not built to block this kind of privacy invasion.

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to androidi

#Oct 30th @ 6:02 PM

The InPrivate feature can block the analytics scripts.

androidi

In reply to ZippyV

#Oct 30th @ 6:18 PM

That's the theory. It says "No items are being blocked on this page" I tried both Auto and manual selection with all that it allowed to select selected (those it found on 3 or more sites).

joechung

In reply to androidi

#Oct 30th @ 7:58 PM

Channel 9 hosts the script in question so InPrivate Filtering won't help unless you can figure out a way to disable that script, hopefully without disabling all Channel 9 scripts. Easy to do with something like GreaseMonkey but that's not available in IE.